Using web-mining to enrich directory service databases and soliciting service subscriptions

ABSTRACT

A system and method are provided for augmenting information on business directory databases and communicating with businesses is disclosed. Using the enriched business directory database and Web mining technology, customized email message are sent inviting businesses to enter their enriched business information into the directory or even subscribe to other paid services provided by the directory service.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is related to U.S. application Ser. No. ______ [dkt.2006-0606], entitled “Finding the Website of a Business Using a BusinessName,” by Narendra Gupta et al., filed on the same date as the presentapplication, and is related to U.S. application Ser. No. ______, [dkt.2006-0421] entitled “Using a Local Business Directory to GenerateMessages to Consumers,” by Benjamin J. Stern et al., filed on the samedate as the present application, the disclosures of which are herebyincorporated by reference herein in their entirety.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to a web-mining, andparticularly to a business service whereby web-mining is used forenriching a business directory database, and communicating withbusinesses inviting them to enter their enriched business informationinto the directory or even subscribe to other paid services provided bythe directory service.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Business directory database websites, such as the YellowPages.com (YPC)website, have brought the basic concept of traditional bound businessdirectories into the Internet/WWW age while improving ease of use andfunctionality. The YPC can trace its history to 1996, when anindependent publisher and two telecommunications companies (SBC andBellSouth) each launched their own online directories. They continued tooperate separately until November 2004, when SBC and BellSouth enteredinto a partnership to create the Internet Yellow Pages joint venture,acquiring the online directory publisher then known asWWW.Yellowpages.com, Inc. The three separate sites were combined intoone site called YellowPages.com. YPC offers searchable directorylistings, and includes information on products/services provided,specialty, brands, payment options, languages spoken, certification &affiliation, coupons & deals, and user reviews. Also, when a userregisters with YPC, addresses of interest, recent searches and recentlyviewed listings can be saved for future reference. Additionally, searchinformation, maps and driving directions can be saved, emailed or sentby text message to a device capable of receiving this type of message.

Customers who search business listings directly are typically lookingfor a particular type of good or service, and are ready to purchase. Thetraditional bound business directories are by their nature publishedperiodically (typically annually) and therefore cannot be changed onceissued. It is very frustrating for consumers to call or worse travel toa listed business location only to find out they are no longer there orhave changed their hours, and then have to start their search all overagain. This is not a limitation of the YPC, as it is a live businessdirectory database which is updated continuously as business or otherconditions change.

Web and Internet based business directory databases, such as TheYellowPages.com (or similar), contain a large number of business names,addresses and phone numbers. Only a small fraction of listings containother frequently requested information such as the URL or businessInternet address, email contact address or hours of operation. Nothaving a means whereby desired information is readily available orretrievable can leave consumers frustrated and possibly drive them tosupport those businesses that provide this information in anticipationof the request.

Businesses that market through the YPC listing could benefit fromproviding users access to a validated and enriched BDB by:

-   -   (1) reduced traffic to their website, where the same information        is repeatedly searched for and retrieved;    -   (2) reduced call traffic to a switchboard or a call center to        field the information requests;    -   (3) improved perception of the business in the mind of the        customer as the business has anticipated frequently requested        information and furnished it prior to asking;    -   (4) increased revenue as more customers potentially do business        with a firm which has anticipated frequently requested        information and provided it from a trusted source.

Additionally, the provider of the Web and Internet-based businessdirectory databases, such as The YellowPages.com (or similar) may beable to command a premium listing fee from the businesses listing intheir database for all the above mentioned reasons.

In order to grow their business, providers of Web and Internet-basedbusiness directory databases could benefit by improving the quality andquantity of information contained within their database. While suchinformation is in the possession of businesses listed in the directory,there currently exists no efficient and cost effective technique tocontact those businesses, solicit the information and receive theinformation.

It would therefore be desirable to use a system and method wherebyweb-mining technology is used to enrich a business directory database byfacilitating contact with listing businesses. There is further a needfor a system wherein once contact is established, offers for enhancedlisting in the business directory database and/or promote paidsubscription services could be made automatically.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

In accordance with a first aspect of the invention, there is disclosed amethod for enriching a directory service database by solicitingadditional business information from businesses listed in the database.The method generally comprises the steps of: determining a URL of alisted business; classifying the listed business in a category byprocessing data located at the URL in a pre-trained classifier model;determining an email address of the listed business by mining the datalocated at the URL; and soliciting the listed business by delivering amessage to the email address, the message being tailored to the categoryof the listed business.

The step of determining a URL of a listed business may comprise thesteps of: conducting a network search using the business name as asearch term; receiving results of the search including a plurality ofURLs; and selecting the URL from the plurality of URLs, wherein the stepof selecting the URL from a plurality of URLs may further comprise thesteps of: determining confidence measures for the URLs, each confidencemeasure indicating a probability that the URL is sponsored by thebusiness; and selecting the URL based on the confidence measures.

The step of determining a URL of a listed business may comprise the stepof obtaining the URL from an on line domain name management company ormay comprise crawling the Web to determine whether a Web page at the URLbelongs to the business.

The step of classifying the listed business in a category by processingdata located at the URL in a pre-trained classifier model may be astatistical/rules based classifier selected from the group consisting ofa naive Bayes classifier, an AdaBoost algorithm and a support vectormachine.

The step of determining an email address of the listed business bymining the data located at the URL may further comprise the steps of:searching the data located at the URL for a link containing a termselected from the list consisting of “contact” and “location”; andextracting the email address from text associated from a link found inthe searching step.

The method may further comprise the step of: validating the determinedemail address by checking whether a domain name in the email is a domainname in the URL or validating the determined email address by checkingwhether at least a portion of the business name is contained in a userpart of an email address hosted by an email hosting company.

The step of soliciting the listed business by delivering a message tothe email address may further comprise inviting the business tosubscribe to additional paid services offered by the business directoryservice.

In accordance with a second aspect of the invention, there is discloseda computer-usable medium having computer readable instructions storedthereon for execution by a processor to perform methods as describedabove.

These aspects of the invention and further advantages thereof willbecome apparent to those skilled in the art as the present invention isdescribed with particular reference to the accompanying drawings.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is an illustrative system of an embodiment of the presentinvention for enriching a database and soliciting business services;

FIG. 2 is a method illustrating an embodiment of the present inventionfor enriching a database and soliciting business services.

DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

Embodiments of the invention will be described with reference to theaccompanying drawing figures wherein like numbers represent likeelements throughout. Before embodiments of the invention are explainedin detail, it is to be understood that the invention is not limited inits application to the details of the examples set forth in thefollowing description or illustrated in the figures. The invention iscapable of other embodiments and of being practiced or carried out in avariety of applications and in various ways. Also, it is to beunderstood that the phraseology and terminology used herein is for thepurpose of description and should not be regarded as limiting. The useof “including,” “comprising,” or “having” and variations thereof hereinis meant to encompass the items listed thereafter and equivalentsthereof as well as additional items.

An important consideration for consumers in deciding to use a specificdirectory service (such as the YellowPages.com) is the quality andquantity of information provided. The present invention comprises asystem and method to enrich a directory service database byautomatically soliciting service subscriptions. The subscriptions aresolicited by first searching the Web to find the business URLs(websites), and then mining those URLs to determine a business categoryand email address for each business. Customized emails are then sent outusing the email addresses and business categories. The email will invitebusinesses to enter their business information in the directory or evensubscribe to other paid services provided by the directory service.

FIG. 1 illustrates a system 100 of the present invention for enriching abusiness directory database and soliciting business directory services.The system may be launched as an individual process for a particularbusiness listing in the database, or may be running in the background asa daemon. For illustration purposes, a user interface 110 is used tolaunch the system 100 of FIG. 1.

For future references herein, the term Internet will generally refer to(but in no way be limited to): the World Wide Web (WWW), public,private, university, research laboratory search engines or databases,fee or subscription databases or other accessible sources ofinformation.

The system 100 starts off with the search module 120 using the companyname as a query in a search on the Internet 130 using a commercialsearch engine 125 or a plurality of search engines, such as Google® orYahoo!®. The search engine 125 returns a plurality of possible URLs orwebsite addresses to be used to discover the business website or URL bymethods described herein or others as known by those skilled in the art.

In one embodiment of the invention, the URL of the business is obtainedby using the company name as a query in a search on the Internet using acommercial search engine returning possible URLs, assigning a confidencemeasure to each returned URL using string matching algorithms based onFinite State Machines or other methods, and visiting the URL with thehighest confidence measure to search for corroborating informationalready contained within a business directory database with informationfound on the URL. The foregoing exemplary system and method aredescribed in detail in U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled“Finding the website of a business using the business name”, assigned tothe same assignee as the present application and filed concurrently withthe present application.

URLs could also be obtained from domain registrars. A domain registraris a company accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assignment Names& Numbers (ICANN) and has authority over generic Top Level Domains(gTLDs) examples such as .com, .net, .org and .mobi. Domain registrarssuch as GoDaddy.com (USA), Gabia.com (S. Korea) and Gandi.net (France)(among dozens of others) register directly while Google.com registersindirectly, through subcontractors. Domain registrars may be used in thepresent invention as resources providing “look-up” services to determinea domain name or URL from a business name.

Alternatively, a Web crawler may be used to determine if a URL belongingto a business. A Web crawler is a program or software agent whichbrowses the Web in a methodical, automated manner. Crawler can be usedfor helpful purposes (i.e. keeping search engine cache current orchecking links or validating HTML code) or unhelpful purposes (i.e.visiting websites to harvest email address for spain or overloadingservers with indexing traffic leaving little bandwidth for actual searchtraffic). A crawler could be programmed to specifically search out andvalidate websites of businesses. Business URLs are returned to thebusiness directory database BDB 140 to enrich the BDB.

A business category module 150 provides the functionality to determinethe business category of the business. Examples are (but are in no waylimited to) restaurants, sporting goods and dentists. This isaccomplished within the module by using a pre-trained classifier modelthat receives as input text or other information from a business' Website and outputs a category or categories that the business falls into.The pre-trained classifier model places each business into one or morecategories based on information found on the business' Web site. Theclassifier utilizes a training set of previously labeled items. Theclassifier may, for example, be a statistical classifier, a rules-basedclassifier or a combination of the two. Examples of such classifiersinclude a naive Bayes classifier, an AdaBoost algorithm and a supportvector machine. Other techniques may be used, provided they result inthe same functionality. The business category is returned to thebusiness directory database BDB 140 to enrich the BDB.

The web-mining module 160 performs two functions: It mines the URL/Webpage identified in the search module 120 for business email addresses,and then validates the addresses. The website may be searched for a linkwith the words “Contact” or “Location,” or the phrase “Contact Us.” Manybusiness Web sites use these key words to help users navigate their siteand find frequently requested information such as address, phone numberand contact methods. When the web-mining module 160 discovers an emailaddress it is extracted for its text using regular expressions (forexample), or other methods as known by those skilled in the art.Additionally, email addresses may be extracted from the Web pagesreached by the URL using well-know recognition techniques. Once an emailaddress has been extracted, it may be validated by using following rules(for example):

-   -   (1) Domain name in the business email is highly likely to be the        same as the domain name in the URL;    -   (2) If the business uses an email address provided by an email        hosting company, like Gmail® or Yahoo!®, etc. it is highly        likely that the business uses the business name or some part of        it in the user part of the email address.        Only validated email addresses are returned to the business        directory database BDB 140 to enrich the BDB.

The email module 170 uses the business category and the email addressesto send customized email messages. Customization could be based mainlyon the business category as establish by the business category module150. The invitation could contain (but in no way be limited to) invitinga business to join or upgrade its listing contained in the databaseand/or soliciting subscription services the BDB service provider offers.Such subscription services might include, for example, prioritypositioning of the business's listing, and the placing of multimediaads.

FIG. 2 illustrates a method of an embodiment 200 of the presentinvention for enriching a business directory database (BDB) andsoliciting business services. A business directory database initiallycontains very basic business information such as business name, addressand phone number.

The process is typically launched (step 210) as either a distinctprocess initiation step (specific request to run) or a daemon (runningin the background).

A search is executed (step 220) executes on the Internet and returns abusiness URL/website, and enriches the BDB.

Determination of the business category (step 230) is made by statisticalclassification algorithms or other method(s), which is (are) used toenrich the BDB.

Web-mining is performed (step 240) searching for email address on theURL/website identified in step 220 and validating the email address.Only validated email addresses will be used to enrich the BDB.

Email messages are composed and transmitted (step 250) using thevalidated email address from step 240. Customized email messages aresent inviting the business to enter their enriched business informationinto a directory or even subscribe to other paid services provided bythe directory service.

This invention presents a number of benefits to the users, thebusinesses listed in a directory and to the BDB service provider.Businesses may already have low cost or free listing of theirinformation on the directory service. By enhancing the quality andquantity of information available in the directory, search results couldbe improved, providing a clear differentiation to the directory servicein the mind of users. An improved perception in the mind of the usercould result in increased user traffic on the directory page providing abusiness justification for those listed in the BDB to pay a premium foradvertising on the BDB or even subscribing to other paid servicesprovided by the BDB service.

The foregoing detailed description is to be understood as being in everyrespect illustrative and exemplary, but not restrictive, and the scopeof the invention disclosed herein is not to be determined from thedescription of the invention, but rather from the claims as interpretedaccording to the full breadth permitted by the patent laws. It is to beunderstood that various modifications will be implemented by thoseskilled in the art, without departing from the scope and spirit of theinvention.

1. A method for enriching a directory service database by solicitingadditional business information from businesses listed in the database,the method comprising the steps of: determining a URL of a listedbusiness; classifying the listed business in a category by processingdata located at the URL in a pre-trained classifier model; determiningan email address of the listed business by mining the data located atthe URL; and soliciting the listed business by delivering a message tothe email address, the message being tailored to the category of thelisted business.
 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the step ofdetermining a URL of a listed business comprises the steps of:conducting a network search using the business name as a search term;receiving results of the search including a plurality of URLs; andselecting the URL from the plurality of URLs.
 3. The method of claim 2,wherein the step of selecting the URL from a plurality of URLs furthercomprises the step of: determining confidence measures for the URLs,each confidence measure indicating a probability that the URL issponsored by the business; and selecting the URL based on the confidencemeasures.
 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining aURL of a listed business comprises the step of: obtaining the URL froman on line domain name management company.
 5. The method of claim 1,wherein the step of determining a URL of a listed business comprises thestep of crawling the Web to determine whether a Web page at the URLbelongs to the business.
 6. The method of claim 1, wherein thepre-trained classifier model is a statistical/rules based classifierselected from the group consisting of a naive Bayes classifier, anAdaBoost algorithm and a support vector machine.
 7. The method of claim1, wherein the step of determining an email address of the listedbusiness by mining the data located at the URL, further comprises:searching the data located at the URL for a link containing a termselected from the list consisting of “contact” and “location”; andextracting the email address from text associated from a link found inthe searching step.
 8. The method of claim 1, further comprising thestep of: validating the determined email address by checking whether adomain name in the email is a domain name in the URL.
 9. The method ofclaim 1, further comprising the step of: validating the determined emailaddress by checking whether at least a portion of the business name iscontained in a user part of an email address hosted by an email hostingcompany.
 10. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of soliciting thelisted business by delivering a message to the email address, furthercomprises inviting the business to subscribe to additional paid servicesoffered by the business directory service.
 11. A computer-useable mediumhaving computer readable instructions stored thereon for execution by aprocessor to perform a method for enriching a directory service databaseby soliciting additional business information from businesses listed inthe database, the method comprising the steps of: determining a URL of alisted business; classifying the listed business in a category byprocessing data located at the URL in a pre-trained classifier model;determining an email address of the listed business by mining the datalocated at the URL; and soliciting the listed business by delivering amessage to the email address, the message being tailored to the categoryof the listed business.
 12. The computer-useable medium of claim 11,wherein the step of determining a URL of a listed business comprises thesteps of: conducting a network search using the business name as asearch term; receiving results of the search including a plurality ofURLs; and selecting the URL from the plurality of URLs.
 13. Thecomputer-useable medium of claim 12, wherein the step of selecting theURL from a plurality of URLs further comprises the step of: determiningconfidence measures for the URLs, each confidence measure indicating aprobability that the URL is sponsored by the business; and selecting theURL based on the confidence measures.
 14. The computer-useable medium ofclaim 11, wherein the step of determining a URL of a listed businesscomprises the step of: obtaining the URL from an on line domain namemanagement company.
 15. The computer-useable medium of claim 11, whereinthe step of determining a URL of a listed business comprises the step ofcrawling the Web to determine whether a Web page at the URL belongs tothe business.
 16. The computer-useable medium of claim 11, wherein thepre-trained classifier model is a statistical/rules based classifierselected from the group consisting of a naive Bayes classifier, anAdaBoost algorithm and a support vector machine.
 17. Thecomputer-useable medium of claim 11, wherein the step of determining anemail address of the listed business by mining the data located at theURL, further comprises: searching the data located at the URL for a linkcontaining a term selected from the list consisting of “contact” and“location”; and extracting the email address from text associated from alink found in the searching step.
 18. The computer-useable medium ofclaim 11, wherein the method further comprises the step of: validatingthe determined email address by checking whether a domain name in theemail is a domain name in the URL.
 19. The computer-useable medium ofclaim 11, wherein the method further comprises the step of: validatingthe determined email address by checking whether at least a portion ofthe business name is contained in a user part of an email address hostedby an email hosting company.
 20. The computer-useable medium of claim11, wherein the step of soliciting the listed business by delivering amessage to the email address, further comprises inviting the business tosubscribe to additional paid services offered by the business directoryservice.